IMAGiNE member must also serve three years supervised release and pay $15,000.

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A fifth member of the BitTorrent piracy ring, IMAGiNE, was sentenced to 23 months in federal prison on Wednesday.

Javier Ferrer, 41, was also given three years of supervised release and ordered to pay $15,000 in restitution. Back in late November 2012, the Floridian pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit criminal copyright infringement. The leader of the group, Jeramiah Perkins, was sentenced to five years in prison back in January.

In a press release, the Department of Justice called IMAGiNE “the premier group to first release Internet copies of movies only showing in theaters.”

As we reported last year, the group was accused of running their BitTorrent ring from September 2009 to September 2011, where they allegedly would "cam" new movies showing in theaters. While one person was capturing the video, someone else would capture the audio portion in theaters and drive-ins. Then, according to the indictment, the defendants would allegedly "digitally refine" and "edit" the audio and video files before releasing them over BitTorrent.

Specifically, the group is charged with seeding copies of The Men Who Stare At Goats, Avatar, Clash of the Titans, and other films. In some cases, they took advantage of the movie theater’s infrared or FM audio system, usually used by people with hearing impairments. Both systems work by transmitting the audio from the control room to individual headsets equipped with a receiver.

NOTE: To be clear, BitTorrent the protocol, which these pirates were using, has nothing to do with BitTorrent the company, which does not condone these their actions, nor does it have any involvement with this piracy ring.

Promoted Comments

What bothers me here is the exploitation of an audio system set up for the hearing impaired may lead to problems for the honest hearing impaired cinema goer. We all know how ridiculous Big Media gets with its copy protection schemes and how it usually only hurts/inconveniences the honest customer.

As for the sentence in this case, the prison time seems a little heavy but the damages are much more sensible than the insane damages Big Media try to screw people out of in civil cases.

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Cyrus Farivar
Cyrus is a Senior Tech Policy Reporter at Ars Technica, and is also a radio producer and author. His latest book, Habeas Data, about the legal cases over the last 50 years that have had an outsized impact on surveillance and privacy law in America, is out now from Melville House. He is based in Oakland, California. Emailcyrus.farivar@arstechnica.com//Twitter@cfarivar